Lance Armstrong, a virtually sure bet to win his seventh Tour de France when the race ends today, has transcended his sport through endeavors such as raising millions to fight cancer through sales of his “Live.strong” bracelet.

Saint-Etienne, France – When the legacy of Lance Armstrong is written, it may not begin with the record seven consecutive Tour de France titles, the last essentially clinched in Saint-Etienne with Saturday’s time-trial victory. It may not begin with the millions of dollars he has helped raise for cancer research.

It may begin with something else. Something bigger.

Boulder native Davis Phinney, a two-time stage winner in the Tour de France, has a prediction with which many will agree.

“Lance has so transcended sport more than any other athlete,” Phinney said. “Already, he’s had this incredible effect on the cancer community, but using that as a platform, I think he’ll win the Nobel Prize someday.”

Whether Armstrong reaches that status, the point is that he has become more than, as he put it, “a kid from Texas that learned how to ride a bike fast.” On the eve of his retirement, as he prepares to ride across the finish line today in Paris, he has become a symbol, a goal for anyone with a crisis, in work or health. He didn’t only overcome testicular cancer. He overcame a cancer that, his surgeon said, left him in 1997 with “a 20-percent chance of life.”

Then he went out and won arguably the most grueling sports event in the world. Seven times. In a row.

And through all the sweat, blood and champagne in Paris, his Lance Armstrong Foundation became a major boon to cancer research, thanks to a little yellow band that started as a novelty last year and wound up raising $51 million. The foundation has raised $85 million to date.

Sitting at a packed news conference Saturday in an old gymnasium in Saint-Etienne, a town in south-central France, Armstrong, 33, wore his yellow jersey as the tour leader and a weary smile. It has been a long career, 13 years as a professional. He said he’ll wait for others to write his legacy but said part of it is just being alive.

“I was lucky enough to live and lucky enough to make it here and lucky enough to win seven Tours,” he said, his girlfriend, rock star Sheryl Crow, watching nearby. “I just tried to be the example of a person that was lucky and got better and believed I would ultimately make it back to life.”

Said former cyclist Paul Sherwen, a commentator for Outdoor Life Network: “How many guys have actually been told you have three months to live and come back to ride a bike again? That kind of helps your dedication to life. Every day is a bonus. When you’re training and it hurts, it doesn’t really matter.”

Without cancer, Armstrong would’ve merely been a great athlete in an obscure sport in America. With what is known in cycling circles as simply The Story, Armstrong enters the realm of near-mythical hero.

When he was diagnosed in 1996, Armstrong was a promising rider for the French team Cofidis. While undergoing chemotherapy, Armstrong asked his doctor whether he could try riding. The doctor said OK.

Armstrong rode 5 miles. He then realized he wasn’t strong enough to ride back. He sat on the roadside and cried.

The news of his cancer devastated the tightknit cycling community. Bobby Julich, a 1990 graduate of Glenwood Springs High School, was a Cofidis teammate of Armstrong’s. He remembers his team director calling with the news.

Julich hung up and cried. Then he walked into a closet to see items Armstrong had left when he moved out of his house. Ju lich saw a big picture of Armstrong winning the World Championships. Julich cried again.

Then he stopped.

“I said: ‘Now wait a minute,”‘ Julich said. “‘This is Lance Armstrong. He’s going to beat this thing. He’s not going to die.’ I wasn’t thinking about cycling at all. I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, he’s going to beat it and come back and win seven Tours in a row.’ But all of a sudden, I knew he would beat it.

“If anyone could beat it, it’s Lance, and he’s got to do it. Because he makes things happen.”

He still does. Earlier this year, Outdoor Life broadcaster Phil Liggett received a letter from a couple in Johannesburg, South Africa. Their 18-year-old son was a huge Armstrong fan. He had terminal leukemia. His one wish was to meet Armstrong.

“I wrote Lance and said, ‘Lance, I know you get lots of these, but read this letter,”‘ Liggett said. “Right before he (the 18-year-old) died, Lance sent him a lot of stuff. It got through, and his eyes just lit up. He died soon thereafter.

“Lance never forgets.”

Though Armstrong will probably go down as the most famous cyclist in history, he won’t go down as the best. Eddy Merckx of Belgium won 530 races, including the Tour de France five times in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Armstrong has won 90 races. Merckx won the Tours of Spain and Italy and many of the spring classics Armstrong ignores to concentrate on the Tour de France.

However, Armstrong will go down as the greatest cyclist in the world’s greatest cycling event. His decision to focus on the Tour de France and his success have transformed cycling and the people in it.

He was the first to prepare year-round for the Tour, and every day is monitored. His trainer, Colorado Springs-based Chris Carmichael, knows exactly what training program to run based on what he did the previous day. With such tools as wind tunnels and body monitors, Armstrong has taken cycling to the scientific age.

His opponents admit it has been maddening to keep up.

“Since the (Tour route) presentation in October, he was already busy,” said Frenchman John Lelangue, director of the Swiss-based Phonak team. “What are the stages? What are the regulations? The new regulation? What is going to be new in the mountains? What type of roads? He’s looking at maps. It’s very impressive. Now, if a team wants to have an objective … it is doing the same.

“Everybody’s doing the same.”

Many teams, such as T-Mobile with five-time runner-up Jan Ullrich and Phonak with Boulder’s Tyler Hamilton and now Floyd Landis, have tried concentrating more on the Tour.

It hasn’t helped. In Armstrong’s seven wins, only two have been by less than 6 minutes: his 4:40 margin so far this year (which is not expected to change significantly after today’s final stage) and his 1:01 win in 2003 when he survived a crash in the mountains and dehydration during a time trial.

“You’re putting your whole season on the Tour de France, but you’re coming up against the guy who you’re trying to beat who’s years ahead of you because he’s learning, he’s evolving, and you’re copying what he did last year,” Julich said. “That’s by far the biggest thing.”

The other part of his legacy will be what he has done for cycling in America. Though competitive-cycling numbers aren’t up, interest in the Tour de France is. Outdoor Life Network usually averages a rating of about 0.1 for an event such as a golf tournament. That’s about 100,000 viewers.

For the Tour de France, it averages 1.6. That’s astonishing for a noncycling nation whose only previous winner was Greg Le Mond, who won three times, the last in 1990.

Armstrong “is the Japanese pitcher who throws a no-hitter in the World Series,” Phinney said. “That’s totally it. Even more so than that because in Japan they play a lot of baseball.”

Armstrong will always have his doubters. Some cyclists whisper that they would do a lot better in the Tour de France if their sponsors allowed them to concentrate on one race a year, too.

And then there’s the contingent that believes the only way he could be this good is through performance-enhancing drugs. The sport has gone through drug scandals, and several cyclists test positive each year.

But Armstrong, who calls himself “the most drug-tested athlete in history,” has never tested positive.

In this Tour, the French authorities singled him out for an extra drug test. Over the years, there have been raids on his hotel rooms and journalists’ investigations, and yet there has been no significant evidence. Armstrong offers this: When a cheating athlete begins getting tested, his performance usually falls off; he doesn’t keep winning.

Will the whispers die with his retirement?

“I hope so,” said Bjarne Riis of Denmark, the 1996 Tour winner and director of the Danish- based CSC team. “This is the worst thing about it. As long as you can’t prove anything, the best thing you can do is respect him. Admire the way he’s riding. In the last seven years, no one has focused as much as he has on every detail.”

After today’s final stage, that focus will vanish as fast as he will. His history has yet to be written, his future yet to be planned. However, before he wins the Nobel Prize, he merely wants some peace.

“My children are here,” he said. “Come Monday morning, we’ll wake up in Paris. The kids, Sheryl and I and a close group of friends will fly to the south of France, lay on the beach and drink wine. And not ride a bike.”

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